If you apply your personal creativity, you can utilize most any special object in an interesting and beautiful way to decorate your home. Our resident interior designer Irwin Weiner ASID was shopping for a client at Two Buttons, the fab Asian imports warehouse owned by best-selling memoir writer Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat Pray Love, Committed) and her husband Jose Nunes, and he discovered their small temple umbrellas from Bali. These are small umbrellas on stands that are used to shelter statues and other sacred objects.

If you haven't discovered Moment of Luxury on PBS, then you're in for a treat! This program boasts Architectural Digest AD 100 interior design great William Stubbs from Houston, TX, and he's one of the most gracious industry spokespeople we've ever watched in action. The show is all about travels to exotic and beautiful places, bringing you design secrets and details that take luxury from great locations and translates them into your decor and lifestyle tips for your own home.

If you follow Money magazine, you'll note with interest (as we did) that mixed in with the hard-core financial tips, advice, and money scion profiles are "softer" articles dedicated to the home and lifestyle issues. In tough economic times, we retreat a little and start to look at our home investments as sounder than when the market was flush and we could flip our homes like pancakes and continue moving up.

But now it's hunker-down time, and Money is telling us all about house wisdom - a move we applaud. Here are some of the tips that strongly resonated with us:

Who doesn't love taking a ride to go foraging for fabulous home design finds? NECTAR in High Falls, NY, is one of those "secret" addresses where the design savvy go to shop. We want all our readers to know about this fantastic design resource destination!